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RE: Steemit News: DMCA Claim for Copyright Infringement
Better hope the post is not a month old. The delete and edit buttons have been removed...
Will it take legal action to get these basic user functions back, or will they fork the code to delete the offending posts?
This is the key moment. If a DMCA action can make the developers remove someones post from the blockchain (without having their password) the whole concept of steemit is dead. They will either stand their ground over free speech and "uncensorable blockchain", or they will fold, give control to an outside source, and destroy the remaining confidence in the project.
Give back Edit and Delete to the users, and this becomes the offending users problem and not a steem or steemit.com problem to get sued over.
I think the way they handle it is by preventing them from showing up on Steemit.com
Yes, that would be simplest. But that solution doesn't remove the data so I doubt they will be happy with that answer. If either steem or steemit.com takes responsibility to correct this manually the first torrent or video linked through IPFS will be used by the MPAA to take this site down.
That censorship solution also puts yet another gatekeeper in charge of deciding who get censored and who doesn't. Who gets to be gatekeeper on a decentralized blockchain? Is it the bot runners that don't care if they detect content correctly? What about on Golos.io, who will be censorship cop over there, any old Russian intelligence agent that can buy a whale account?
Instead of monitoring, censoring, or deleting what users post, this project should act like an adult decentralized technology stack and give the users control, responsibility, and blame for what they post. Anything else destroys the whole "trustless uncensorable decentralized ledger" concept and just creates another position\group with power over everyone.
Simply giving back the edit and delete functions puts the responsibility back to the user, anything else will cause a loss of trust.
The main reason that users can't do this, is because it is actually not easy from a technical perspective. The way the blockchain is currently written, anything that can be edited is part of the active database. The witnesses, miners, etc. that are running it would need an exorbitant amount of memory as more and more content got added, if it were setup this way. They are looking into potential solutions, but it is not an easy problem to solve.
Also I feel that putting the responsibility and blame purely on the user has it's problems as well. How would the situation be handled where the user refuses to take their material down? Also, how do you punish a wrongdoer if they choose to remain anonymous?
That is simply not true. That story has been fed to people over and over since the changes were implemented, mostly by developer sockpuppets I suspect.
If you were here for the past 3 months you would know that those functions worked just fine until they disabled them. It is completely possible for the steemit.com website to display only the last (edited) copy of an entry in the blockchain.
Want proof it works fine? Just go find yourself a old comment without a vote or reply and then delete it. Viola, steemit.com will not display it anymore, just like it should be. If it causes performance problems on the completely separate steem blockchain, that is directly because of questionable development and release practices.
(Que Canned Excuse: It's in beta!)
The complete lack of regard for the user experience around here is depressing, and I tire of arguing with the developers and even supporters for it to get better... Believe whatever you want, if they cave to outside pressure on this issue then I think this horse is probably dead anyway.
So I don't claim to be an expert on this but I have a technical background, and I have done some research on it.
I don't know what changed 3 months ago, but if I were to guess it would probably have something to do with the blockchain size growing as more content got added. Again this is just a guess, so I could be wrong.
As far as the comments with no upvote, it probably has something to do with what is held in consensus in the blockchain. What we are talking about as far as actually removing content that is over 30 days is at the blockchain level, and at least today the blockchain does not allow it (regardless of what the Steemit UI allows or doesn't allow the user to do).
The issue where the development team is taking about trying to find a way to make this work is here. It is something that they are looking into, but I don't think it is a huge priority compared to a lot of the other changes they plan to make.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/339